Revision as of 06:09, 27 October 2009

MPlayer is the oh-so-popular movie player for Linux. MPlayer has support for pretty much every video and audio format out there and is hence very versatile, even though most people use it for viewing videos.

Frontends/GUIs

Qt: smplayer is in the extra repository. The smplayer-themes package provides themes for it.

Gtk+: pymp and gnome-mplayer are in the AUR and community repos, respectively.

gmplayer: this gui is no longer included in the mplayer package. There is an alternative mplayer package (mplayer-x) in AUR in which the gmplayer gui is enabled.

Browser integration

If you want to let MPlayer control video viewing in your favorite web browser, try one of the following:

Firefox

pacman -S mplayer-plugin

or

pacman -S gecko-mediaplayer

Konqueror

pacman -S kmplayer (also provides a complete frontend to MPlayer.)

Usage

Configuration

System-wide configuration is located in /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf, whereas the user-local settings are stored in ~/.mplayer/config. The file /etc/mplayer/example.conf is a good starting point, and here is an example:

#profile for up-mixing two channels audio to six channels
# use -profile 2chto6ch to activate
[2chto6ch]
af-add=pan=6:1:0:.4:0:.6:2:0:1:0:.4:.6:2
#profile to down-mixing six channels audio to two channels
# use -profile 6chto2ch to activate
[6chto2ch]
af-add=pan=2:0.7:0:0:0.7:0.5:0:0:0.5:0.6:0.6:0:0
#default configuration that applies to every file
[default]
#use X11 for video output
vo=x11
#use also for audio output
ao=alsa
#prefere using six channels audio
channels = 6
#scale the subtitles to the 3% of the screen size
subfont-text-scale = 3
#never use font config
nofontconfig = 1
#add black borders so the movies have the same aspect ratio of the monitor
#change if your monitor is not 16/9
vf-add=expand=::::1:16/9:16

Translucent Video with radeon and Composite enabled

To get translucent video output in X you have to enable textured video in mplayer:

mplayer -vo xv:adaptor=1 <File>

Or add the following line to ~/.mplayer/config:

vo=xv:adaptor=1

You can use xvinfo to check which video modes your graphic card supports.

Transparent SMPlayer in Gnome with Composite enabled

Have you noticed the transparent screen of smplayer when you are using compiz and maybe cairo-dock? Well it’s ridiculous that when you open your videos using SMplayer you can just hear audio and no video! Here’s how you fix this: [copy paste into terminal]